The Bird Room Read online

  She holds his head in her hands, blinkering him. She pulls him close and winds herself around him.

  Then they fuck.

  I got the message this evening:

  Vs sortd. Meet u in Noose bogs 10.30.

  I’m loitering by the urinals, not making eye contact and pretending to wash my hands every time someone comes in. I’ve washed them six times now. Barry is late. My fingers are starting to sting.

  Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is Pub Quiz Nite! Muffled questions and cheers leak in through the crack of the door. Whenever it opens and closes, the air displacement makes the sinks rattle.

  I feel shifty.

  I am sober.

  I’m not here to look at nobs.

  A big drunk man comes in; Borstal tattoos, sovereign rings, a front tooth missing.

  I pretend to finish zipping up and go over to the sinks. I wash my hands for the seventh time. I can’t feel the soap anymore.

  The urinals flush in unison. They mock me with a chorus of gurgling disinfectant.

  She fucked him, she fucked him, she fucked him, she fucked him.

  The big drunk bloke is washing his hands now. I’m stripping the skin off my knuckles at the drier; the hot air is like sandpaper.

  Where’s Barry? Good old Barry, with all those burst capillaries winding around his nose like a driving map of the Yorkshire Dales.

  Now the drunk bloke is after the drier, so I shuffle over to the mirror, touching my hair and waiting for him to leave. I’d hide in the cubicle but someone’s kicked the door in and shat on it. It’s one of those pub mirrors which is nothing more than a square of scrubbed semi-reflective metal bolted to the wall.

  She fucked him, she fucked him, she fucked him, she fucked him.

  The bloke leaves and the door closes.

  Her coat was gone from the hook by the door. Her big brown boots were missing, too. She’s out with him again. They’re in public somewhere, fucking. Market Square, probably. A crowd has gathered. Someone is handing out balloons and commemorative plates. A group of tourists is clapping and taking photographs.

  The drier stops.

  I get back into position with my fly halfway unzipped at the far left urinal.

  Someone has written

  Why can’t the world be tender and kind?

  on the tiles in marker pen.

  Underneath it, someone else has written

  Fuck you

  Barry comes in.

  ‘Fuck, mate, sorry,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had.’

  Barry’s right. I don’t believe the night he’s had. He tells me some long-winded story about this ‘German tart’ that he’s ‘banging on the side’.

  I only half-listen.

  I can’t look him in the eyes.

  He finally rustles around in the pocket of his tweed jacket and comes out with a boiled sweet, two raffle tickets and a little plastic container, for camera film. He hands it over. Something rattles inside.

  She fucked him, she fucked him, she’s fucking him now.

  ‘No shame in it, lad,’ he says. ‘Neck one of these bastards and you’ll be chopping wood with your bellend. Rock solid, I guarantee it.’

  I open the lid of the container and shake the pills onto my palm. They are a pale oval blue. There are four of them.

  ‘I only need the one,’ I say.

  I am not a man. I am a hat stand.

  I’m standing in the corner of the living room, naked. Her favourite hat hangs from my erection. It’s getting cold. I’ve been here too long.

  I hear a key in the lock and then her boots in the hall, clipping this way.

  She turns on the light and pauses in the doorway. She looks around the room, but not in my direction. Then she turns and walks through to the kitchen. I hear her begin to whistle. I take off the beret. My penis is so hard it’s almost making a noise.

  She’s in the kitchen.

  She’s making instant coffee.

  I sidle up behind her. My penis accidentally knocks the saltshaker off the dinner table on the way. It smashes on the tiles. She doesn’t even blink.

  She pours hot water into a mug and stirs it with a spoon. She turns and walks past me. A faint smell of roll-up cigarettes.

  I look at my reflection in the back-door window.

  I’m still here. I still exist.

  I hear the TV go on in the other room and the clatter of something far away, like a cat falling off a fence. I hear the hiss of my breath. And something else, too. A small humming noise. I bend down. It’s coming from my dick – a buzzing sound, like a wasp trapped in a pint glass.

  I stand in the doorway.

  ‘Alice,’ I say, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I don’t want you to ignore me any more.’

  She sips her coffee.

  ‘I’ll do anything,’ I say.

  She puts the mug down by her foot and scratches her nose. She blows a strand of hair from her face.

  ‘Just tell me and I’ll do it.’

  I stand in the doorway for the length of a chat show. The buzzing from my penis becomes so loud it fills the room and rattles the windows. She must be able to hear it. I ask her again and again, What is it you want me to do?

  Then I know.

  I know now what she wants.

  Eventually she yawns and switches off the TV. She turns off the light. I follow her along the hall and up the stairs and into the bedroom. She’s in front of the mirror, unbuttoning her cardigan, pulling off her vest, unclipping her bra, wriggling out of her jeans. Behind her, in the mirror, my eyes are wide and black. She steps out of her knickers. I watch my hand come up behind her. I watch it touch her shoulder. I’d almost forgotten what her skin feels like. It’s smooth and soft and ice cold. She doesn’t flinch or pull away. She doesn’t do anything. I look into her eyes in the mirror. I turn her to face me.

  My dick buzzes loudly between us.

  Alice picks her way quietly round the room. The morning; too late for her to make it into work today. The alarm clock didn’t go off because it’s in the post to a woman in Portsmouth. Her legs are slightly bruised. Her hair falls in her face as she untangles a pair of knickers from the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed. They go on first. Goodbye, vagina.

  I lie on my back, watching her dress. She clasps the bra around her waist, slips it up over her breasts. I see the white knots of her spine. I see her nipples in the dresser mirror. I watch them disappear into the cups of the bra. Goodbye, left nipple. Goodbye, right.

  Then there is her mouth, broken by slivers of hair. No speaking sound comes from it. She covers her arms and shoulders with the cardigan. Her belly disappears, button by button. Her fingers shake. I watch the denim of her jeans swallow the chicken-leg birthmark on her thigh.

  Goodbye, knee, elbow, ankle and arse.

  Goodbye, collarbone, contacts and calf muscle.

  Goodbye, goosebump.

  Once she’s fully disappeared, she goes about making the bed as though I’m not in it. She straightens the sheets, plumps the pillows, folds, brushes and tucks. I lie there like something wooden, unfeeling.

  She’s in the hall now, by the phone. I hear a jangle of keys, a clink of change and the beep of a new message received. I hear her zip up her boots, pocket her purse and clip four steps to the door. Finally, I hear the swish of traffic and trees.

  After a while I get up. I don’t get dressed. I go downstairs naked and stand in the hall by the phone. Her coat is gone. Her boots are gone. They aren’t coming back this time.

  She’s left the front door open and I stand for a while in the doorway. A bright cold morning, the tarmac wet with dew. A car drives past. The driver looks at me funny, and he mutters something to himself. I walk down the path and stand on the pavement. A little kid in the distance shouts something. His mates point and laugh. Someone in the house across the road is watching from a bedroom window. I look up and down the street. Nothing. She’s gone.

  So I go back up the path and into the house and c
lose the door behind me.

  William pushes Helen backwards towards the bed. She lets herself flop onto it, feeling the cold starchy duvet against her back. She pulls her knees up and opens her legs. The curtains are drawn. The light in this room is cold and yellow and electric. He climbs onto the bed, positioning himself over her, awkwardly fumbling with a condom, tearing it open with his teeth and putting it on with his free hand, not letting go of the camera. He keeps the viewfinder firm against his eye. The camera obscures most of his face. She can just see his mouth, which is screwed closed, and his left eye, which is a slit.

  Helen has done a lot of things in her job.

  She’s pissed into things, put things inside her, spoken all kinds of lewd pre-written things to camera.

  But this will be the first time she’s actually had sex for money.

  Helen doesn’t know what to do with her face. Usually, when she’s being filmed, the camera will move down towards her body. It will zoom in on her breasts or her vagina, leaving her face free to do whatever it wants. Her face will become bored or mock-serious or real-serious or absent, and she will start to think of something like how she forgot to tape a programme for Corrine or what she’ll say to her mum when she calls back later on.

  But William hasn’t taken the camera away from Helen’s face. He hasn’t panned it down to her body. She looks deep into the lens, watching it curl and open.

  She tries to look how a ‘desirable woman’ might look.

  She flutters her eyelashes.

  She opens her mouth.

  She licks her bottom lip with her tongue.

  She lets her breath purr past her teeth in a seductive oooh sound.

  The tip of his penis is centimetres away from her vagina. She’s not used any kind of lubricant and she realises she’s not wet. She puts her hand on her belly, slides it down towards her vagina, but then feels awkward and lets it drop to her side.

  He’s not moving the camera away from her face. The veins in his neck are standing out. There are wisps of hair on his chest. She thinks she can hear his heart beating.

  Helen feels herself become completely static and, for the first time, imagines what will happen afterwards; him playing the tape back once she’s gone, sat there in the dark with his hand down his trousers, watching her face as it arranges itself into a series of ridiculous porn star expressions.

  She isn’t nervous. She isn’t nervous. Helen is an actress.

  The tip of his penis is now millimetres from her vagina.

  ‘Oooh,’ she says, batting her eyelashes at the camera lens. ‘Fuck me.’

  He freezes.

  ‘Please,’ she says.

  His penis is one millimetre from her vagina.

  There is a beeping noise and the red record light blinks off.

  He takes the camera from his face, pushes himself up into a sitting position and moves to the end of the bed, facing away from her. He puts the camera down next to him. He takes off the condom and rests his head in his hands. Helen can still see his penis, poking up from between his legs. It looks absurd, in contrast with the rest of his body which is pale and drooping, sad-looking.

  ‘Did I do something wrong?’ she says, not in the porno voice.

  He shakes his head.

  Helen knows she did something wrong, but can’t work out what.

  ‘It’s impossible, anyway,’ he says. ‘What I was trying to do. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Helen. ‘Okay.’

  She wants to touch his back. She knows it will make no difference to anything whatsoever, but she really wants to reach out her hand and touch his back, and for him to know that she doesn’t have to touch his back, that she doesn’t have to do anything at all if she doesn’t want to, but she’s done it anyway.

  She moves closer, waits a few seconds. He doesn’t seem real. He seems like a parody of something or like he’s been turned inside-out, and she feels bad that it’s her seeing the inside things of him. She wants to tell him it’s okay. She wants to tell him everyone’s fucked up. She wants to tell him about some of the strange things people have made her do for money.

  She reaches out her hand and touches his back.

  He flinches.

  He stands.

  He turns to face her.

  Helen looks at his penis, which is still incredibly hard and pointing at her face like an angry buzzing finger. It is making a noise.

  Helen wants to laugh. She feels it mount inside her; a manic violent laughter like a pan of water, boiling then overflowing. She keeps her face blank but lets the laughter spill out silently inside her.

  He notices her looking at his penis. He looks down at it, too.

  ‘It’s Viagra,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ says Helen.

  She looks up at his face.

  The laughter turns from boiling water to salt. It falls in a dry shower on the pit of her stomach.

  ‘How long does it last?’ Helen asks.

  ‘About twelve hours,’ he says.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she says.

  She can’t help herself. She starts to laugh again, this time outwardly. She imagines him having to make dinner, brush his teeth, read a newspaper, all with that ridiculous throbbing hard-on.

  ‘Doesn’t it make it difficult? You know, if you want to go out or something?’

  His expression changes; not a smile, but something, like the corner of a curtain being lifted back and a tiny bit of light getting in.

  ‘I don’t really get out that much,’ he says, picking up his clothes.

  When Helen was Clair – when she was about eight years old – her parents took her to a farm. One of those ones open to the public. There were other things there, too; go-carts, trampolines, a gift shop. It probably wasn’t a real farm, one that actually produced anything. The animals were farmed to be touched. It was the summer holidays – a sunny day, now bleached sepia-yellow in Helen’s memory.

  ‘Go on,’ her mum said.

  They were looking at a sheep. The sheep was sniffing the fence or chewing a piece of grass.

  Clair felt scared. She felt the sheep might do something weird and violent to her; bite off her face or smack her round the head with its hoof. She didn’t really want to, but she walked towards the sheep, to please her mum.

  Clair held out her hand. The sheep came over. It licked her hand and she felt the rough scrape of its tongue on her palm.

  She felt surprised.

  It was good, and she felt silly for feeling scared, and she wondered if there was some way you could be employed to do this; if this could be your job, to just stand there and have your palm licked all day.

  Afterwards, she wanted to ask her mum. But even at eight years old she knew it was a silly thing to say out loud.

  It’s dark when Helen comes out of his house. She steps carefully past the snails and out onto the street. It’s raining still. He gave her the money in an envelope, which she hasn’t opened yet. There’s nothing written on the front of it.

  She went back into the bathroom and put on her own clothes.

  She had to keep suppressing the urge to talk to him more, to ask him if there was anything she could do, like if he needed anything from the shops or whatever. Of course, she didn’t ask. She felt silly. She didn’t lock the bathroom door. She kept trying to imagine what he wanted her to look like. She had to stop herself about five times from going back into the bedroom and saying, Let’s give it another try.

  What the fuck are you doing? she asked herself, rolling her tights up over her legs.

  ‘You can have these if you like,’ he said when she went back into the bedroom.

  He handed her a carrier bag; the clothes she’d been wearing.

  She didn’t know whether she wanted them or not, but she said thanks anyway and smiled at him. He must have sensed she felt weird, because he said, ‘You could give them to a charity shop or something.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  Then he gave her the envelope. He to
ok it out from the pocket of his jeans.

  ‘You can’t always have been like this,’ Helen wanted to say. ‘What happened?’

  Instead, she just thanked him again and took it.

  He didn’t say anything else. He walked her to the door, the ridiculous bulge still there in his trousers, making him hunch a bit and walk funny.

  When she waved goodbye, she couldn’t tell if he waved back. It was dark in the hall and the door swung closed too quickly.

  Even with the lights on, the house is dark. Dark and damp and smelling of wet clothes. Helen’s sure this house is what’s making her hair go frizzy overnight. She’s sure that the house is making her body damp, on the inside. Her heart has drops of condensation on it in the morning. Her lungs have begun to curl like sodden paperbacks.

  It’s not even fun to live here.

  Helen takes her mobile out of her handbag. Two missed calls. Her mum and Duncan. She feels like putting it in the bin.

  NO FOOD – is taped to the TV – OR TOILET PAPER. SORRY. USE THE KITCHEN ROLL.

  Helen isn’t hungry or tired.

  She goes upstairs and gets into bed anyway, still in her coat. She puts her sleeve in her mouth and sniffs.

  Eventually, a dream comes. Helen is in William’s house again, wearing the clothes from the carrier bag. She’s putting things on the shelves; a vase with flowers, a framed photograph, a glass figurine of a ballet dancer, a 70p porcelain biscuit jar. She goes into the kitchen and arranges Yorkshire Dales placemats on the table. She pulls a big roll of carpet from her jeans pocket and drapes it over the floorboards.

  She is climbing the stairs.

  She is hanging curtains.

  She is opening the bedroom door.

  Then she trips on something. Someone is touching her shoulder and rocking her gently awake. It’s dark in the room and at first she thinks it must be Corrine. Helen squints at the person. It’s not Corrine. It’s the sister.

  ‘What is it?’ Helen asks. ‘I was sleeping.’

  ‘Come here,’ the sister says. ‘I want to show you something.’